It has become my tradition to summarize the conference year in a post on New Year’s Eve. If 2023 was a good conference year, then 2024 was even better! I spoke at or participated in more than 40 events across the World. I traveled to 31 different countries and visited 91 cities throughout the year. What makes me especially proud is that I was able to speak at even more Java User Groups this year than ever before. Let’s try to make it even more next year!
You can see a complete list of all the events and links to my blog posts from the events below. All this information, as well as a continuously updated list of upcoming events, can be found on my Developer Advocate page on the Jakarta EE Website.
The sixth edition of JakartaOne Livestream is a wrap! Last year, we started the tradition of creating a video for our Keynote. Here is a teaser for this Year’s video. You can see the full length version on the Jakarta EE YouTube channel. That is also where you will find all the excellent technical sessions. Everything will be made available as soon as possible.
Running a full day online conference like this is a lot of work, but also a lot of fun. I hope we are able to convey that feeling to those of you that watched, or watches the recordings.
JakartaOne Livestream is usually the last conference of the year for me, and I really enjoy these days in (usually) snowy Ottawa to end the year. This year, though, I have one more conference (Ya!vaConf) coming up next week in Warsaw before settling in for the Holidays.
I visited Porto once back in the ’90s when I was Interrailing (traveling by train on a relatively affordable ticket valid in most European countries) across Europe with some friends. But that was a while ago, so it was about time I returned.
The day before the conference, there was a speaker dinner at a local restaurant where we were served a variety of dishes from the local cuisine. It is always nice to meet new and old friends at dinners like this.
My talk Jakarta EE Meets AI was scheduled as one of the first talks after the opening keynote. It was very well attended and I had some interesting discussions afterwards.
Porto Tech Hub 2024 gathered over 1000 attendees at an awesome conference venue by the river. The exhibition hall was bustling with energy, especially in the coffee breaks between the sessions.
This was the 24th edition of the South Tyrol Free Software Conference (SFSCON) in Bolzano. I is a free event that attracts visitors mostly from Northern Italy, Austria and Switzerland. This year, there were about 1000 registered attendees.
All the sessions at the conference are 15-minute long lighting talks happening simultaneously in four session rooms. This means that there are lots of sessions during the day. In addition to my talk, I also presented Carmen’s talk since she wasn’t able to make it to the conference. First, I presented A Journey of Contribution and Collaboration in Open Source. This is a talk I have done a number of times before, but usually as a 30- or 45-minute session, but it also fits as a fast-paced 15-minute lightning talk.
SFSCon is a nice conference and the format with only lightning talks fits it well. Due to to proximity to the University of Bolzano and the free tickets, there were lots of students among the attendees.
I have been to Bucharest several times speaking at various conferences. Devcon was a new experience, even if it is organized by the same team as some of the other ones I have spoken at. It is a two day conference with multiple tracks, or stages, that vary a little between the days. The Java Stage on Day 1 was in the big room, and gathered a pretty good crowd. I would estimate that the capacity was somewhere around 200, and the room was fairly full for all the talks during the day.
My talk Why Jakarta EE Matters to Spring – and Vice Versa was one of two Jakarta EE talks among the 7 talks on the Java Stage. Edwin Derks did the other one. Adding George Adams’ Adoptium talk, Eclipse Foundation projects were very well represented on the conference.
November is almost as busy as October conference-wise, so I was only able to attend the first day before heading to the next conference. DevCon is a well-organized conference, and I can see myself coming back to speak at it later as well.
It’s been five years since I last was in Tokyo, so it was about time to be back. Last time, I was there for the JCP EE Face-to-Face meeting as well as JJUG CCC 2019 Spring where I presented the Jakarta MVC specification. This time, at JJUG CCC 2024 Fall (I still haven’t figured out what the CCC stands for, but I am sure someone will educate me…), I gave an overview of Jakarta EE 11. I also added a demo of how to easily integrate AI in a Jakarta EE application using Langchain4j and CDI.
Even 30 million inhabitants, you can still find som quiet places in Tokyo. I had a wonderful morning run in the area around my hotel through small alleys, along rivers and in parks. Tokyo is really a collection of cities and villages all connected together with in impressive network of trains, subways, metros, and buses.
I was only on ground in a little more than 48 hours, but still got to experience a lot of the city. There is something going on all the time. And totally safe. you can (if you want) leave your mobile phone outside on a café table in a crowded area and it will still be there when you come back out after having purchased coffee inside. I don’t know any other major city anywhere in the world you would be able to do that.
Open Community for Java 2024 was a part of Open Community Experience (OCX), the revamped EclipseCon. EclipseCon has been going on with the same format for years, and it was in need of a brush-up. This was definitely achieved with OCX. The conference venue was fantastic and the recurring feedback was that it felt like a younger edition of EclipseCon. It don’t think that was because of the attendees as there were at least as much grey hair as usual, but more a result of the hipper vibe of the venue. The food options were excellent, and there was always access to water, soft drinks, tea, coffee, and a selection of snacks.
Since EclipseCon never really was a Java conference directed at the larger Java community (don’t get me wrong, there has always been a lot of Java content at EclipseCon, but mostly related to the various Eclipse Foundation projects, the IDE in particular), it was a bit hard to create awareness of Open Community for Java, The number of attendee could definitely have been higher, but all the talks got a decent number of attendees at least. Those that showed up had an excellent selection of high-quality talks to chose from. For those not able to attend, the talks will be available on the Eclipse Foundation YouTube channel shortly.
I did my talk Why Spring Matters to Jakarta EE – And Vice Versa on the first day of the conference. It is a good talk, if I should be so “unscandinavian” and say so. It gives a good overview of Jakarta EE and shows how the specifications overlap with Spring.
Never a conference without a morning run at least one of the days. This year, I got up at 6:30 and went for a run two of the three conference days. On Wednesday, I was joined by Daniel (I think he was motivated by the cool Jakarta EE running shirt), and on Thursday Gesine came along. This year, we had Jakarta EE branded running socks as one of the giveaways. I may have some of them to bring to future conferences if they manage to ship the leftovers to me after the event
This was my second time speaking at Community Over Code – The ASF Conference. It is a very community oriented conference that is centered around the Apache Software Foundation’s portfolio of projects. The conference moves around from city to city, and this time the location was Denver, Colorado.
It was my first visit to Denver, and I really enjoyed walking around in the city. It has a pleasant relaxed vibe with lots of options for lunch and dinner. It will be interesting to see if my five days at 1600m altitude will have any effect when I go for a run when I get home at sea level.
My second talk was more tailored to the audience with the title Jakarta EE – As Seen Through the Lens of the ASF. I thought I was being clever when I switched the color of the specifications from Jakarta EE Blue (hex 1B208B) to ASF Red (hex D22128) as I went through them, but discovered toward the end of the talk that it looked a little too much like a map of an upcoming election… In my third talk I switched to using ASF Feather Purple (hex 662F8F).
My third talk was Why I Choose Apache NetBeans for Jakarta EE. In this talk I demoed the amazing tooling that NetBeans offer for Jakarta EE. I even learned about some new ones while researching the talk. The Jeddict AI Assistant is pretty awesome and may be a reason alone to switch to NetBeans. Rather than charging a monthly subscription as most of the other AI assistants do, you just supply your OpenAI API key in the settings. Which means that you only pay for what you actually use.
Including JMaghreb 3.0 in 2014, this was my seventh time speaking at Devoxx Morocco. Four times in Casablanca, twice in Agadir, and this year in Marrakech. This conference has such a great vibe no matter which location they choose to run it. The community is amazing and very engaged by asking lots of questions in the talks and in the hallway between talks.
The venue in Marrakech was great with properly adjusted air-conditioning, a nice pool area, and an excellent buffet lunch restaurant. Before the second day, a group of eager morning runners met for a 5K run before breakfast.
My talk this year was A Journey of Contribution and Collaboration in Open Source. This is a non-technical, inspirational talk for getting more developers to get involved in Open Source. It is a pleasant talk to do and it is pretty timeless, so I will continue submitting it to conferences as long as there is interest in the subject.
This was my first time at Berlin Expert Days. This conference is organized by the community for the community over two days. The venue is pretty cool with a modern exterior and slightly older interior and well sized for the conference. The first dad had four parallel tracks, while the second had two.
I presented A Journey of Contribution and Collaboration in Open Source in the afternoon on the first day. Since the presentation does not have any demos to lean back on, it is kind of a different experience for me. The audience were engaged, and we had some good questions and discussions after the talk.
If you ever visit Berlin, you should make sure to go for a run, or a walk if that is your cup of tea, in Tiergarten. I went for a morning run before the conference both days. The second day I ended up running 11 km. The weather sunny and the temperature perfect for running.
